There’s a guy on the Science Forum at the Amazon web site who claims that the theory of evolution by natural selection is no longer a falsifiable proposition. He says it has been proven to the point that no possible falsification is conceivable.

To me, this seems contrary to what I know about science. Popper, et.al. (I’ve read some philosophy of science, but it’s not my specialty.)

I know that for all practical purposes the jury is in, and we are as confident about this field as we are about anything in science. But is this writer correct? Is the theory beyond falsifiability even in principle?

Here is his argument:

“Almost all scientific theories are universal statements, such as Newtonian mechanics (true at moderate speeds) and relativistic mechanics (true at all speeds), which are not provably true even though there are piles of evidence which show that they are correct. But the theory of evolution consists of existential statements only, which are provable by demonstration (and have been):
– Heritable mutations occur.
– Some mutations are more beneficial to survival than the un-mutated parents.
Thus the ToE is provably correct, and of course also demonstrably correct as well.”

those things are remarkable in every way.
what blows my mind is the very wide range of environment they can survive in, that is pretty assume heat temperatures that would render any other animal cooked to over done, cold to make no sense and pressure and the vacuum of space just wow. How or why did they ever evolve to acquire such traits?

Some comments made me curious so I looked up tardigrades at wikipedia:

Tardigrades can withstand temperatures from just above absolute zero to well above the boiling point of water, pressures about 6 times stronger than pressures found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than would kill a person, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for nearly 120 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce.

That looks like my 2nd grade papier-mâché project, my pet dog, Roscoe. The art teacher asked why my dog had six legs. I explained to her that one of the six appendages was his tail and the other one was (in the vernacular of my youth) his “pee pee.” Needless to say, in the early ’60s, that bit of information didn’t go over too well with Sister Mary Daniel.

Wait a minute… if it’s a scanning electron micrograph, and the little beasty can survive vacuum, cold almost down to absolute zero, and high doses of radiation…

Is this a snapshot of a living one? Did it just walk away during the photo shoot? When you scan one and record the stage location, does the next viewing require a circular search pattern to find it again?